Let’s Get Political

Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the Security Council in Moscow. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is sworn in by the President of the German lower house during the government’s swearing-in ceremony at the Bundestag in Berlin.

In an interview with the writer Owen Jones, Ralf Little says he became embroiled in a Twitter row with Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, because he believed the government was trying to turn people against doctors. The actor, who starred in The Royle Family and 24 Hour Party People, accuses Hunt of arrogance in dealing with recent strikes by junior doctors.

“It’s like Spain in 1936.” Those are the words of Alexander Norton, a charismatic 31-year-old railway worker from east London, as Turkish forces besiege the Kurdish city of Afrin. Like Britain’s courageous International Brigades eight decades earlier, Norton risked his life to fight Isis alongside Kurdish freedom fighters in Kurdish Syria. As you read this, a secular democracy which celebrates women’s rights is under attack, including by Turkish-aligned troops who have sung al-Qaida songs and threatened to cut off the heads of their “atheist” victims. If you’re wondering why Kurds and their supporters occupied King’s Cross and Manchester Piccadilly stations last weekend: here’s why. The Conservative government is arming to the teeth a nation ruled by an authoritarian despot, whose regime is linked to extreme jihadist groups, and which is now attempting to liquidate one of the only islands of democracy in a sea of Middle Eastern despotism: and yet virtually no one is speaking out about it.

Theresa May has already shown how robust she is in opposing Putin. Because after Putin's opponent Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned, she rejected setting up an inquiry into who did it. But that was different, because back then the Russians were kind poisoners

Never mind ‘Corbyn the spy’, our governing party pockets millions from regimes that back extremism – and gets away with it

The Conservative party is in the pocket of foreign powers that represent a threat to the national security of Britain. It is a grotesquely under-reported national scandal, lost amid a hysterical Tory campaign to delegitimise the Labour party with false allegations of treason. If Labour had received £820,000 from Russian-linked oligarchs and companies in the past 20 months – and indeed £3m since 2010 – the media outrage would be deafening. But this is the Tory party, so there are no cries of treachery, of being in league with a hostile foreign power, of threatening the nation’s security.

On a green hillside in Afrin in northern Syria, Arab militiamen allied to the Turkish army which invaded this Kurdish enclave seven weeks ago have captured a group of terrified looking Kurdish civilians.

When it comes to trade, liberal Brexiteers are cut from a very different cloth from Donald Trump. Or so we’re led to believe. Trump wants protection. But Brexiteers want more trade, even unilateral tariff cancellations on imports to the UK.

In both public and private sector, employers are routinely not paying enough. What scares them most, though, is people realising

Take a moment to absorb the innovative ways the government has found to undermine, demoralise, and attack NHS workers.

There’s the never-ending real terms pay cut which, by last year, had left the average health worker nearly £2,000 poorer in real terms than 2010. Ambulance crew are £5,286 worse off. There’s the starving of resources, even as an ageing population imposes greater demand – this has been the longest squeeze in spending as a proportion of GDP since its foundation. There’s the determination to privatise swaths of the service by stealth, and a chaotic top-down reorganisation which has fragmented the service.

This isn’t just about the public sector, of course. Today it was revealed that 179 employers have been failing to pay the legal minimum wage